Five Paths

By Sid Gardner

Five Paths is a companion novel to a nonfiction book published in March 2016: The Future of the Fifth Child. Both books are about international child abuse and trafficking. In Five Paths, five college students graduate in 2000, inspired by a professor to work in the field of child protection. They adopt different paths in their work, choosing careers in politics, religious agencies, cyberfinance, music therapy, and armed defense of women and children. They bond through their work on behalf of children and agree to meet every five years and compare notes, becoming closer over the years as the challenges mount in their chosen fields. Some are threatened with violence, while others struggle against political and bureaucratic obstacles. All five work to make a difference for the millions of children who are harmed by abuse, neglect, and international trafficking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781491797440

Sid Gardner

Mr. Gardner serves as President of Children and Family Futures, a nonprofit agency based in California. He has worked in elected and appointive office in federal, state, and local governments since 1965. He graduated from Occidental College and has Master’s degrees from Princeton University and Hartford Seminary. Mr. Gardner is a Vietnam veteran, and lives in Mission Viejo, California with his wife, Nancy Young, and two of their four children. He is also the author of seven novels, including a companion to this book, titled Five Paths.

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 Sid Gardner.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-9743-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-9744-0 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 05/23/2016

Contents

Part One 1999-2000 Western University: The Class

Part Two 2000-2005

Part Three The 2005 Gathering: New York

Part Four 2005-2010

Part Five The 2010 Gathering: Florence

Part Six 2010-2015

Part Seven The 2015 Gathering

Afterword

PART ONE

1999-2000 Western University: The Class

F ourteen students straggled into the seminar room, juniors and seniors at Western College in Los Angeles in the fall semester of 1999. With electives on their hands, they had all decided to sample the first session of a curiously titled course called The Fifth Child: Global Child Protection in the 21 st Century. They numbered six men, eight women, stretching both terms, as demanded by the proprieties of the approaching new century, to include 20 and 21-year-olds in the full bloom of their late adolescence.

An objective observer would have described the lot as carrying themselves with considerable self-regard, though mixed with a measure of anxiety at their first view of their professor. She stood, unsmiling at the head of a long table and gestured them to the chairs around the table.

The course schedule labeled her Ms. Gabriela Lopez, so she was not of the professoriate caste, unburdened with a doctorate. She appeared to be in her early fifties, trim with a long dark braid trailing down her back. She had a definite air of command as she sat down in a large chair in front of the only window in the room.

On an early September afternoon, the room was warm, offsetting the older charm of a narrow, second-floor classroom in one of the original buildings on the campus. The air conditioning struggled with limited success to cool the room.

The students sat in their adopted poses, ranging from advanced slouch to prim, back-on-the-chair, both feet on the ground, hands folded or arranging notebooks and pens. A class notice had advised no laptops or tablets allowed.

Lopez asked the students to introduce themselves and tell where they were from. After each had said a few words, she asked a second question. Why are you here?

The first student to answer was named Roberto Garcia, who had said he was from California. With a greater degree of confidence than most of the others had shown in their self-introductions, he said, I'm in computer science. I want to see if technology has anything to offer the field we're going to be talking about.

Lopez allowed herself a small smile. I suspect it will, but you will have plenty of time this semester to tell us what it is.

As each of them answered the question, they predictably mentioned their interest in children, their curiosity about other cultures, and their majors in international relations, political science, psychology, or languages. There were two international students, a woman from Iraq and a man from China.

A tall blonde woman introduced herself with a frown as Suzanne Forrester, from Chicago. She added that she was especially interested in the harm done to girls. Another woman named Felicia Fiori, who was from New York, said she looked forward to discussing how direct action could make a difference for children. Jeremy Boxton, a short man from Texas, told a somewhat wandering story about religious groups in Texas who had gotten him interested in services to children in other countries. And an African-American man from South Carolina named Stanley Wright said he hoped to learn how better political leadership could help children.

Lopez watched them carefully as they filed in and began trying to answer her questions. She paid the most attention to the seniors, full of themselves, getting ready to make choices, to leave the sheltered campus and go become somebody. As she always did with a new class, she tried to pick out the ones that would matter, who might come to care enough to choose rougher, steeper paths.

The men were always so hard to read. Did they think it was just an easy elective, or would they be challenged by her descriptions of the ferocity of the battles to protect children? She knew the women were sometimes carrying their own deeper reasons for seeking out her class, wounded by their own experience with bias and abuse. Which ones were there out of a well-intentioned but shallow desire to help children, and which of them would learn how to get past their own history and go to work to prevent unspeakable harm done to real children far away from the oak-lined quadrangle?

She hoped she'd catch hold of some of them, sending them forth on the Mission. She worried about the balancing act between pressing too hard, making the Mission seem like narrow idealism and, on the other side, holding out the rewards that she knew could come---but rarely quickly, and sometimes never.

She knew she could teach the class. But she wondered if she could teach the students in it what lay ahead if they wanted to join the battle---and why it was worth their lives.

Lopez said, Thank you. You've each raised some interesting points, and we're going to discuss all of them in this class.

She rose and turned to the whiteboard behind her, and wrote the number 400,000,000 on the board. Speaking slowly as she sat down, she said, We are here to talk about the inexcusable abuse of four hundred million children. If that number and the facts behind it do not bother you, you probably should not be here. This class will demand a certain amount of outrage from each of you. She paused. I hope you are capable of outrage at this stage in your education.

She looked at each of them, and went on. "Our discussions, the field trips we will take, and your readings will help you begin to understand what is happening to these children. But we will spend more time as we go on through the semester on what is really the central question: what you should do about it. You may decide that you will go on to a glorious career in some other field, and your answer to this question may be that you will send a few dollars to the charity of your choice when you remember."

She paused again, and then added, That would be good---but not good enough.

She went on. "I know your generation got the idea somewhere that it isn't cool---or whatever your current word is---to express emotion that is either too positive or too negative. They call you 'the whatever generation.' My response to that is based on more than two millennia of philosophy---both Western and Eastern: get over it and get into it. Get over your being too cool to feel empathy, and get into making a difference. We're going to look hard at some facts in this course, but there will also be some emotions. It turns out that it is impossible to talk sensibly about children without emotion coming into it."

She looked out the window, gesturing at the campus below them. We're not an elite Ivy League college. We don't have to teach you how to get a six-figure job. We only have to teach you to think, and how to live, if you're interested.

Then, feeling she might be too hard on them---at least some of them---for a first session, she said more quietly, I have reason to believe that some of you will respond magnificently to this challenge. I also have faith.

She went on to spend an hour on the numbers, broken up with questions from the students, which she welcomed. She carefully reviewed a painful litany: the number of children who attended no school after the primary grades, the number of girls married before their teens, the number of children killed by leftover land mines, the number of girls mutilated for sexual reasons, the number of children under ten who worked full-time. She went on and on, through sixteen different categories of child abuse and neglect, explaining that these were the categories developed by the United Nations Children's Fund---UNICEF.

She used slides from a Powerpoint, but spent more time explaining the data than reviewing the actual slides. The whiteboard became covered with numbers, and then with arrows that she drew, showing how early marriage and child labor and leaving school at eight were all connected.

The board became almost impossible to read, and as she drew to her conclusion, she smiled, waved at the board, and said Looks messy, doesn't it? That's part of what we'll be looking at in this course. Why are there are so many pieces of the puzzle and whether anyone is trying to put the whole puzzle together, or just parading around with their piece?

She wrapped up the session by assigning them to pick one of the problems she had briefly described and bring in a three-page summary of the issue and some of the proposed solutions. She ended by saying I know this is depressing at first. But even more depressing is how little anybody is doing about it.

She briefed them on the field trips they would be taking and handed out waiver forms they needed to sign to be able to travel in the van rented by the university.

As they walked out, Stan said to Roberto, She seems a little intense.

"A little? Like The Chain Saw Massacre is a little intense."

Felicia, overhearing them, said I thought she was great. I wish all professors laid it out like that in the first session. She told us where she's going and basically said get out if you don't want to go along. No bullshit. I like that.

At the next session, the fourteen had winnowed down to twelve. The woman from Iraq was no longer attending and one of the men had also dropped out, a junior who had introduced himself as an international relations major.

They had all Googled Lopez and learned that she had left Cuba with her parents at five, had graduated from Florida State University, worked for the United Nations and Human Rights Watch, and had been teaching for ten years. She had published three books on children's rights and lectured at conferences in Europe and all over Latin America. She was divorced, with two adult children.

After two class sessions, they formed informal study groups of three or four. Lopez suggested they group themselves based on where they were seated, and then move around among groups until they found a group that was compatible.

By the accident of seating, the four in Group A were seniors, but only two of them knew each other well. The group consisted of Stan, Suzanne, Jeremy, and Roberto. Stan and Jeremy had taken some classes together, the others knew each other casually, as seniors usually did on a small campus of less than two thousand.

After a week, Felicia asked Roberto if she could join Group A. Roberto heard from one of the other students that she had gotten into a fierce argument with some of the members of the group she had originally joined. They had suggested that she join another group. With a qualm or two, Roberto invited her to join them at their next meeting. He vaguely knew who she was, and had an impression that she was brash, sometimes funny, and usually with a guy---but never the same guy for long.

As she walked into the group which was meeting in Stan's apartment a few blocks off-campus, Felicia announced, Let me be clear about this---I left those other wimps because they wanted to talk about petitions and I wanted to talk about protest. So let me know now if any of you are afraid of a little hell-raising when we finally get around to helping kids.

Roberto spoke first. Whoa there. Slow down. Why don't you tell us where you're coming from? I've got no problems with direct action---my grandfather walked with Cesar Chavez. But tell us why you disagreed with those other guys.

Pulling a chair out from a small table in Stan's kitchen and plunking herself down in it, Felicia fired back, They're typical of most people at this rich kids' school---they think writing letters makes a difference. Lopez is talking about some real stuff that affects real kids, and letters aren't going to cut it.

She spoke fast, eyes darting around the group, seeming to dare them to disagree or even to speak up. Dressed in what they had come to realize was her typical sweat shirt and leggings, she folded her arms and waited for a response. The others were watching Roberto, as the first respondent to Felicia's semi-attack.

He said, You're welcome to join us, though I doubt most of us are as rich as you seem to think. We've been talking about several different ways to deal with the problems Lopez has been bringing up. And they all go beyond letter writing. So, welcome.

Felicia wasn't done. What do you say we start out, she said, ignoring the fact that the group had already met once, with telling our stories? Not the rehearsed pablum you gave out in class, but the real stories. Who wants to start?

They all looked at each other, faces sharing a look that said who the hell made her boss? But they were amused enough by her bluntness and self-revelation that they tacitly decided to go along with her demand for the moment.

Stan said, I'll start. Middle class black family from Columbia. South Carolina. Sports in high school, football here, but decided to stay away from an athletic career based on some advice from an uncle who was in the NFL. Older brother of three boys. I came to Western because I'm going back home to get into politics somehow and I wanted to see another part of the country before I dig back into the roots at home.

Roberto said, Guess mine is a lot like Stan's. Middle class Latino family, grandfather came up during World War II to pick crops and stayed. Rest of us all born here. Drybacks. My folks teach school in Glendale, lived there forever. Two sisters, younger. Folks gave me a kiddie computer when I was three and I never looked back. I live for technology. I'm close to my family, which is good, because they're only fifteen minutes away.

Jeremy leaned back in his chair and said, I grew up in the hill country, outside Austin. My parents were sort of hippies who played country music when they were sober. A girlfriend took me to church when I was a freshman in high school, and I felt like I had found my escape route. I guess you'd call me a fundamentalist Christian, but I'm still trying to figure out what that means.

Felicia clapped her hands once and said, "OK, you guys are doing good. I grew up in Queens, in a typical Italian family. My father worked in sanitation, my mother stayed home with my three brothers and me. My brothers were all older and they either teased or ignored me. My nonna---grandmother---told me I could go to Hollywood and be a star. The rest of them all laughed, except my father, who ignored me even more when I hit puberty. I'm here because it was the college furthest away from home that accepted me and let me escape my family. I got three things from those people. I speak pretty good Italian, I can cook Italian, and I know lots of opera. Italians' gift to the world---opera, along with pasta and Mussolini."

Suzanne went last. She spoke in a monotone, looking at a poster of the 1963 March on Washington on Stan's wall. I was abused when I turned thirteen. It made me neurotic, and I'm still pissed about it. My mother cut me off, but sends me some money. I don't get along well with most men. Then she added, somewhat mysteriously, At first. She added, I'm here because I heard about this course and I wanted to do something to protect kids.

They were a striking group, both in their diversity and their individual appearances. Stan was tall, with close-cropped hair he kept at a length that would have passed inspection in most basic training units. Avid movie-goers would have called it a toss-up between his resemblance to Denzel Washington or Blair Underwood. He had an athlete's walk, taking longer strides than most people. But his most remarkable feature was his ever-ready smile. He'd smile when he was in class, when he was walking to class, and when he was eating---between bites. On the rare occasions when the smile disappeared, it was a dramatic contrast.

Stan's only known vice was a liking for short, stubby cigars, which forced him to map out the very few places on campus where he could smoke and gave him a lingering aroma that Felicia was quick to detect and note with a quiet yuchh.

Suzanne's height was the first thing you noticed about her, until you saw the details of her lovely face. She kept her light blonde hair in a boyish cut that only emphasized her fine cheekbones and green eyes. Her voice was quite soft, rising a bit when she wanted to emphasize a point. She neither smiled when she seemed amused, which was rare, nor frowned much in class; expressionless was her usual expression. Her steady gaze at Lopez seemed to say I'm listening hard and I'm trying to put all the pieces together.

Jeremy was a bit below average height, slightly overweight in a way that could fit the all-purpose adjective stocky. He had thick, sandy-colored hair. He was usually at ease with his classmates, some of whom teased him a bit, but affectionately, as they got to know him and saw his acceptance of their response to his openly religious nature. His convictions were deep, but with an unusual tolerance of irreligious remarks and attempted put-downs. His usual response was a slight smile that registered as if you think that's funny, all right---I'm not going to debate it.

Roberto dressed as though he wanted to destroy the image of a baggy pants, shaved head look of Latino males in Southern California. He wore his hair long and apparently untreated by any artificial means. As a joke, he occasionally put a plastic pocket protector in his shirt pocket with two or three pens, as if wearing a sign I'm a techie nerd. He was as tall as Stan Wright, in the neighborhood of six feet, often boosted up further when he wore boots that he described, when asked, as my El Paso Tony Lama specials.

Felicia was short and short-tempered. Full-breasted, she tried unsuccessfully to conceal it with an array of loose sweat shirts, even in warmer months. She often wore an intimidating frown, but when something amused her, a corner of her mouth turned up in a tentative half-smile. Her dark, curly hair was worn long in an early Valerie Bertonelli look---Italian to the max. Her laugh could be a weapon, sometimes humorless, sometimes genuine. She often leaned forward in class, an in-your-face body posture that went with her overall aggressiveness. But as the members of the study group got to know her better, she relaxed more often. What was left was a slight scowl that could flow into an equally slight look of approval, perhaps signaling gratitude that her friends overlooked the chips she tended to carry on both shoulders.

In mid-October, the dozen members of the class filed out of the large van that had brought them from the college, and walked into a nondescript storefront in a strip mall in southeastern Los Angeles.

Looks authentic to me, one of the men murmured as he and the others walked into a small conference room where Lopez awaited them. As they seated themselves around a large table dotted with coffee stains, they looked at the maps pinned up on the walls, maps of the greater Los Angeles area and maps of the world with red markers covering some of the capitals.

Small signs on the front windows identified the agency as Child Protection Associates. A dozen staff members watched the students as they walked through the agency's offices. Some seemed to the students to be about their own ages, while others appeared to be in their late 40s or early 50s.

When they were all seated, Lopez began. Basic ground rules, people. What you see or hear in these offices and the other sites we'll visit is totally off the record. No names repeated or written down. No photographs. The work here is sometime highly confidential and involves court cases, so we can't have names tossed around.

She added, sternly, That doesn't mean you can't take notes for the papers you will be expected to write on each of the agencies we visit. I want you to prepare at least five pages on your impressions of the projects we visit and an additional five pages on the problems underlying their work. Questions?

There were frowns, but no questions.

Lopez introduced the director of the agency, a Latina named Salinas, to speak to the students. As she walked up to the head of the table, emerging from the group of staff who were observing along the wall, the students realized she could not have been older than thirty. Lopez had explained that Salinas had become director three years before after working on the staff as an intern while attending Cal State Dominguez Hills nearby.

Salinas leaned on the desk in the front of the room, and began. We work with children, mostly 12 to 18-year-olds, who are out on the streets for one of three reasons: they have been kicked out by their parents or relatives, they have left because they were being abused, or they have been trafficked for prostitution by large or small trafficking organizations. About a third of the kids we deal with are undocumented, meaning they came here with their parents when their parents entered the country illegally.

She paused and said in a different, stronger tone of voice, We do not use the phrase 'illegal immigrants' here. These children and their parents entered the US without legal standing, just as some of your ancestors did when they came from Europe or elsewhere.

She continued to describe the children they served, using the maps behind her to explain the flow of youth from their families to foster care, in some cases, and on to living on the streets. She pointed to the countries where the youth had come from: Mexico, all Central American countries, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and, in the case of the trafficked girls, China.

Three staff members then came forward and presented brief case studies of children they had worked with during the past few weeks. The frowns on the students' faces grew longer as each case study unrolled, with examples of sexual and physical abuse that were at times stomach-turning.

The brief, tentative questions that came from the students included How can you do this work---isn't it painful to think about? How much do city and county agencies provide services when you refer kids to them? How good are those services? The answers, respectively, were essentially Yes, Not much and Not very.

And at the end, Roberto asked Do you have any idea how many of those who need your services you are able to help?

Salinas frowned and said, Less than 1%, based on the latest estimates of kids living on the street or in prostitution houses. We do what we can with the resources we have, but the need is enormous.

Lopez thanked Salinas and began summarizing the session. We've been talking in our class about children who are maltreated. You know that some of those children live thousands of miles from here---and today you learned that some are in this neighborhood. We're going to look at this problem of abused children on a global scale, but I hope your visits to agencies like CPA will remind you that these are not just exotic problems of faraway cultures. They are also here and now. You want to work with other, exotic cultures? Fine. But our own culture has plenty of people who think that hurting kids is OK. For some of the worst of them, it's good business.

As they climbed back into the van, Felicia said to Suzanne, Cold bath of reality, I guess.

Suzanne just nodded.

Over the next two months, as the fall turned to Southern California's curious form of winter, cooler with occasional, brief spells of rain, the group met faithfully after class each week except during the December holidays. The study session rotated around to different apartments or dorm rooms, meeting in restaurants or coffee shops when that was more convenient.

In November, the group gathered for the first time in Roberto's apartment, which he had warned them was a little unusual. He lived in a two-bedroom apartment high in the hills behind the college. The apartment was half glass walls facing the view, which looked out into the valley that ran down toward the Pasadena Freeway. It was furnished with modern furniture, and had two full walls of floor-to-ceiling books. When doing some low-grade snooping the first time they visited, Stan and Jeremy spotted a room with what appeared to be five monitors and an unknown number of desktops that looked as powerful as anything they had ever seen on campus.

Stan asked the obvious question as the group settled into the couches and chairs around a fireplace in the living room. Wow, Berto, this is a pretty nice pad. You rob a bank, or is there where your secret, rich girlfriend keeps you in style?

Roberto was trying, with mixed success, to manage his obvious pride in his place and his not wanting to show off. No, man. It's kind of a long story. The short version is I was in a computer science class when I was a sophomore and they asked us to write some code. So I did, and the teaching assistant noticed it and asked me if he could show it to the professor, who was an adjunct from Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. The guy liked the code, he got me a patent for it, we sold it, and now it throws off a little money every month that helps me pay for this place.

What does the code do? Jeremy asked.

Roberto looked uncomfortable. Uh, I designed it to sort of listen in on e-conversations. But I think the feds are using it to track other countries' space programs.

Felicia laughed. I love it. Berto is a spy. Or a spy enabler.

Thereafter, the group kept rotating around as they met. But for obvious reasons, Roberto's apartment was their preferred gathering place.

The rough spots in the five members' interactions with each other smoothed out or were mostly ignored, as Lopez' intensity kept the group focused more on the content of the course than on each other. Most of the time, the severity of problems affecting the children Lopez talked about suppressed the natural tendency of college seniors to assume the world was preparing itself to revolve around them.

As a college and a location, Western reinforced Lopez' message, working at letting its students know that they and the world were connected. The campus was a bit of paradox, a closely linked set of buildings around an oak-bordered quadrangle, with dorms and classrooms that rose gradually up a hillside owned by the college. Some of the buildings had been modernized, while others looked just as they had decades earlier when a series of movies set in colleges had been made on campus in years when Hollywood studios sought close locations. The classic look of the buildings still provided the backdrop for an occasional made-for TV or cable series.

This academic oasis, however, was located on the eastern edge of one of the world's most diverse cities: Los Angeles. Surrounding the campus were smaller homes built in the 30's and 40s, with larger apartment buildings on the major streets. Glendale, Pasadena, and the neighborhoods of what was loosely called East Los Angeles bordered Western. Students heading west for beaches or the downtown area passed by the southern edge of the expanses of Forest Lawn Cemetery.

Some students might try to disappear onto campus for four years, but the city and the world were very close by at Western---a good thing, in the view of most of its students and faculty.

Gradually, the five seniors became individuals to each other, learning more about why each was really taking the course, recognizing the strengths and the inevitable baggage each of them brought to the class. They took the study group seriously, going over the lectures, rehashing the field trips they had taken, arguing among themselves about what Lopez meant or what it meant in political and policy terms.

Felicia remained the erratic spark plug of the group, sometimes irritating the others by her persistence and sometimes forcing them to stop throwing generalities at each other and get specific. Suzanne spoke the least, harboring what the others came to realize was her own trauma. When discussions of child abuse became specific, especially about girls, Suzanne fell silent, and the others soon learned not to press her---as Lopez had quickly seen.

Jeremy talked about the issues of harm to children in essentially religious terms, but became quiet when Lopez and others pointed out abuse within the church and abuse in other religions that was sometimes justified as doctrine. Stan's lens was politics, and he usually interpreted issues through a framework of whatever the US Congress was doing about the problem. He seemed puzzled when Lopez pointed out early in the course that the US Congress was one of only